Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Introduction

The first season of Handel’s and Heidegger’s new company at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket opened with Lotario on 2 December 1729. The Overture is a particularly fine one. It opens in the standard French manner, but unusually the following Allegro is built on a simple ground bass, just six notes long. Handel varies the textures so skilfully that the repetitions are hardly noticed. The final movement, in the style of a gavotte, was reused as an actual dance in Handel’s Oreste, a pasticcio he produced in 1734. One phrase was also taken up again in the gavotte of the overture to Semele (1743).

The libretto of Lotario is adapted from Antonio Salvi, and is based on historical events in tenth-century Italy immediately preceding those referred to in Handel’s Ottone. In the original version of the libretto the leading male character, based on King Otto I of Germany, was called Ottone, but in Handel’s version the name was changed to Lotario (Lothair) to avoid confusion between the two operas. In Lotario Duke Berengario has become king of Italy by murdering the legitimate king and is laying siege to the city of Pavia, where Queen Adelaide, the widow of the murdered king, has taken refuge. Berengario and his wife Matilda want their son Idelberto to marry Adelaide to protect their position and secure the throne for their descendants. In Act 1 King Lotario of Germany visits Adelaide and promises to help her, giving her the courage to withstand the threats of Berengario and Matilda. She asserts her determination not to give in to their demands in a dazzlingly brilliant aria, bringing the act to a thrilling close.

Adelaide: The more tenacious be the chains with which my feet are bound by the cruelty of others, the more ways they shall be dear to my soul, and prison shall be yet more pleasing to me.

The little ship frolics in the sea while a favourable breeze smiles; but if a fierce storm agitates the heavens and whips up the waves it is lost in a wreck. My heart will not yield in that way to the scorn and rage of cruel fate, for in the face of death it can still triumph by greatness.

A little ship dances on the waves While favourable breezes blow; But should a fierce gale Cloud the sky and arouse a storm The ship is wrecked and lost.

Not in this way will my heart Yield to a pitiless fate, To anger and to fury, For even in the face of death It will proudly triumph.

Lotario was the first opera of the so-called ‘Second Academy’ period; the original Academy had broken up, and Handel had to assemble an entirely new roster of singers for the venture, including Strada, who sang Adelaide. It was a fair success but never revived, and Handel cannibalized the score for later works. For the plot he returned to early Italian history, already treated in Ottone and Flavio. The action is impenetrably convoluted even by the standards of opera seria. Adelaide, widowed Queen of Pavia, is besieged both physically and amorously by the family of Berengario, the rival King of Milan, and finally rescued by Lotario, King of Germany (in fact Otto, renamed to avoid confusion with the earlier opera). By the end of the first act Adelaide has been imprisoned by Berengario, and responds with a textbook ‘simile aria’: whatever threatens her, she will never give in.